Kennedy Square eBook

CHAPTER XI

All the way back to his house St. George’s wrath
kept him silent. He had rarely been so stirred.
He was not a brawler—­his whole life had
been one of peace; his whole ambition to be the healer
of differences, and yet there were some things he
could not stand. One of these was cruelty to
a human being, and Rutter’s public disowning
of Harry was cruelty of the most contemptible kind.
But one explanation of such an outrage was possible—­the
man’s intolerable egoism, added to his insufferable
conceit. Only once did Temple address Harry, walking
silently by his side under the magnolias, and then
only to remark, more to himself than to his companion—­“It’s
his damned, dirty pride, Harry—­that’s
what it is!”

Harry also held his peace. He had no theories
regarding his father’s conduct: only facts
confronted him, one being that he had purposely humiliated
him before the men who had known him from a boy, and
with whom his future life must be cast. The end
had come now. He was adrift without a home.
Even Kate was lost. This last attack of his father’s
would widen the breach between them, for she would
never overlook this last stigma when she heard of
it, as she certainly must. Nobody would then
be left on his side except his dear mother, the old
house servants, and St. George, and of these St. George
alone could be of any service to him.

It had all been so horrible too, and so undeserved—­worse
than anything he had ever dreamed of; infinitely worse
than the night he had been driven from Moorlands.
Never in all his life had he shown his father anything
but obedience and respect; furthermore, he had loved
and admired him; loved his dash and vigor; his superb
physique for a man of his years—­some fifty
odd—­loved too his sportsmanlike qualities—­not
a man in the county was his equal in the saddle, and
not a man in his own or any other county could handle
the ribbons so well. If his father had not agreed
with him as to when and where he should teach a vulgarian
manners, that had been a question about which gentlemen
might differ, but to have treated him with contempt,
to insult him in public, leaving him no chance to
defend himself—­force him, really, into a
position which made it impossible for him to strike
back—­was altogether a different thing,
and for that he would never, never forgive him.

Then a strange thing happened in the boy’s mind.
It may have been the shifting of a grain of gray matter
never called into use before; or it may have been
due to some stranded red corpuscle which, dislodged
by the pressure he had lately been called upon to
endure, had rushed headlong through his veins scouring
out everything in its way until it reached his thinking
apparatus. Whatever the cause, certain it was
that the change in the boy’s view of life was
as instantaneous as it was radical.